Cons:

Separated from my childhood love of the original cartoon, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron is a merely average sci-fi third-person shooter with some mediocre-at-best level design. But combine the two, and it's lifted several notches on my personal enjoyment scale. No longer must I use my crappy imagination to control Dinobot leader Grimlock as he smoothly transforms into a mecha-tyrannosaurus and smashes Insecticons by the dozen, or the Combaticons' Bruticus as he rampages through Autobot defenses. And the original voice of Optimus Prime? Awesome. Story and characters can make a mediocre game better -- at least for the right audience.

High Moon treats Transformers with far more maturity than the braindead Michael Bay movies.

A more appropriate subtitle might've been GTFO Cybertron, as this is an excellent retelling of how the Autobots and Decepticons left their dying homeworld for the greener pastures of Earth, with plot material pulled from both the original G1 pilot episode and the 1986 animated movie. There are some stunningly cool moments -- and even with the occasional dumb joke, it's treated with far more maturity than the braindead Michael Bay movies.

Getting The Gang Back Together

The 13-mission single-player campaign (no co-op this time) takes roughly as many hours to complete. Each chapter switches between characters on both sides of the war, each with a distinctive special ability that defines his missions and injects some needed variety to killing the same disposable Autobot and Decepticon grunts several thousand times. Cliffjumper, for example, can cloak, making his portion a stealth shooter against heavy-duty Decepticons with scanners, while Megatron's levels are all about blasting the crap out of everything in his path.

Metroplex: the toy you went over to the rich kid's house to play with.

Trying to drive Optimus Prime's alien truck form down a tight Cybertron corridor is like playing bumper cars.

With one notable exception, all of them can transform from agile robots to fast-moving sci-fi vehicles at will -- a mechanic so cool that I really wish High Moon's level design let me make better use of it. Once I got the hang of it I was flipping back and forth, using the vehicle form to present the enemy with a smaller target, quickly escape danger, or make use of the built-in heavy weaponry of a tank form. Yet, except in the few missions played as a flying character like Starscream, the tightly linear levels are tough to navigate. Particularly when using the mouse to steer, trying to drive Optimus Prime's alien truck form down a tight Cybertron corridor is like playing bumper cars. But I've gotta say, I'll probably never get tired of watching those slick transformation animations (unlike the repetitious ones used every time you force open a door).

Roll Out

Yes, I used the mouse to drive. Since this is a shooter and I like to aim, I chose to play almost entirely with the mouse and keyboard rather than a gamepad. Aside from the inability to remap keys to my liking it works quite well in robot form, but driving and flying is more challenging than it needs to be.

The few open areas are a taste of what an open-world Transformers game could be.

Fall of Cybertron isn't a cover-based shooter, though running around in the open will get you scrapped pretty quick. For giant metal robots, these Transformers are surprisingly fragile -- the simple generous health meter of War for Cybertron has been replaced with Halo-style recharging shields that go down in the blink of an eye, and their armor isn't much better. Shotguns end you quickly, even the mighty Megatron. You can equip a health upgrade, but except for while playing as mega-bots like Grimlock and Bruticus, I never felt quite as sturdy as it seemed like I should. That made some areas of the campaign legitimately tough to get through on normal difficulty.

More Bang For Your Buck

Upgrades start small with ammo capacity upgrades and firing rate increases, and get big.

Maybe it's just that the weapons are more impressive than last time. On top of the typical pistol/shotgun/machine gun/rocket launcher arsenal of War for Cybertron, High Moon has added fancy new ones like the health-draining Energon Harvester, an electric bolo launcher, and more. My favorite remains the Riot Cannon, a slow-firing, hard-hitting gun with a satisfying kick to it. It's also a prime example of the upgrade system: it starts small with ammo capacity upgrades and firing rate increases, and gets big by overcharging the last shot in every clip with a 500-percent damage boost and a massive explosion effect.

Run away, Cliffjumper, run away.

Transforming in multiplayer leads to some cool moves you won't see in any other game.

It must be repeated that, unlike War for Cybertron, this campaign is strictly single-player with no co-op option. That's a bit of a downer, but there's still the fairly entertaining 16-player multiplayer matches with four classes to level up and a strong four-player Escalation mode, aka Horde mode. Transforming is far more fun with other humans than in the single-player, since the AI enemies seldom actually use it, and it leads to some cool moves you won't see in any other game. Out of ammo? Transform and blast'em with your tank cannon. Outnumbered? Flip into jet mode and bug out.

It is, of course, a very console-style setup with no server browser, but the auto matchmaking worked well enough for me. I don't foresee Fall of Cybertron having much of a multiplayer community a couple of months down the road, but it's reasonably good fun while it lasts.

One other thing you should be aware of going in: There are occasional prompts to buy DLC from within the game (like to unlock a certain weapon), a practice I find obnoxious even though there are plenty of guns included in the stock version. It is, of course, completely ignorable, and hardly got in the way of Fall of Cybertron's ability to push all of my nostalgia buttons. Fans of the original cartoon should definitely play this at some point -- though perhaps not at the $60 launch price.

Spy Guy says:
You know what this franchise needs? An open world. Picture GTA4 where the vehicles turn into fightin' robots. No wait, don't -- your head might explode from the pure awesomenesss of the mental image. But how about you young'uns who weren't around in the 80s? What do you think of High Moon's version?

See the next page for our Port Authority's look at the technical side of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron.